Necessity

Necessity is the quality or state of being necessary, unavoidable, or absolutely requisite. In Greek mythology this quality was personified as the goddess Ananke who was mother of the Moirae, the Fates; in Roman mythology she was known as Necessitas. This page is for quotations on the theme of Necessity and the necessary.

Spanish proverb, as quoted in The International Thesaurus of Quotations (1970) edited by Rhoda Thomas Tripp, p. 429

الضرورات تبيح المحظورات

Necessity knows no restrictions.

Arabic Proverb

Necessity knows no laws, and a man must part with his last farthing to buy bread.

"C." in The Farmer's Magazine Vol. 1, No. 4 (October 1838), p. 271

Necessity knows no laws or customs.

Joseph Kinmont Hart, Mind in Transition : Patterns, Conflicts and Changes in the Evolution of the Mind (1938), p. 88.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

English proverb; early notable authors who used this proverb include Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (1726), and Sir Walter Raleigh, The History of the World (1614)

Commonly misattributed to Plato from Benjamin Jowett's popular idiomatic translation (1871) of Plato's Republic, Book II, 369-c as "The true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention." Jowett himself (Plato's Republic: The Greek Text, Vol. III "Notes", 1894, p. 82) gives a literal translation of Plato as "our need will be the real creator," without the proverbial flourish.

Necessitas est lex temporis et loci

Necessity is the law of time and place.

Hale's V. C. 54, reported in The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904) edited by James William Norton-Kyshe, p. 182

The law of necessity dispenses with things which otherwise are not lawful to be done.

These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by the scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

The right of a nation to kill a tyrant, in cases of necessity, can no more be doubted, than to hang a robber, or kill a flea. But killing one tyrant only makes way for worse, unless the people have sense, spirit and honesty enough to establish and support a constitution guarded at all points against the tyranny of the one, the few, and the many.

John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government (1787), Ch. 18.

In the image of the sphere, where the true existence of thought can alone recognize itself, the non-corporeal Ananke becomes conceivable, being the law that forms the world and holds it together. The entire cosmos, as it were, becomes her image and attribute… ~ Otto Brendel

When we are incapable of recognizing the laws of necessity, we believe ourselves to be free.

Ludwig Börne, as quoted in Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists (2007) by James Geary, p. 16

Variant translation: Wherever it is impossible for us to recognize the law of necessity, we believe we are free.

Ananke must above all be regarded as cosmicforce, that is as the ruling law in the universe; thus … the super-personal, cosmic significance of "the All" ruled by Ananke as well, can be accepted as certain. It represents in the universe the inviolability of cause and effect and does so as dual essence, as a mythical personage belonging to the oldest theogony or as the earliest philosophical concept of the mechanics of natural events. The two fuse and need not be separated here; but we must also state that the mythical figure was never entirely accepted in the religion proper, the rites of the faith. Ananke remained an elusive outsider, often perceived as cruel. But it is important that at an early stage religious and philosophical speculation closely linked Ananke to the elements of the world's existence (among which Goethe included her too). Like the intellect, Ananke is said to be a highly refined, non-corporeal substance which penetrates the whole world and touches its boundaries. Altogether she is a force belonging to the extremities of the world; like Pythagoras' Chronos she is the outermost layer of the sphere, encircling the cosmos or being the farthest vault of the heavens. The complete identity of her nature shines through the variously established but actually transparent concepts. She may be ethereal for the same reason that she is occasionally even equated with the ether — the world soul and supreme element — thereby becoming associated with the concept of the immaterial and the omnipresent which fills the world as the divine primal substance. We may quote here … Empedocles's cosmic law that "spreads all over the wide-ruling ether" and which, therefore, must have the same place and function in the universe. Finally one can apply here the universal formula of the beginning, middle and end of all things being nothing other than a variant of the formula of the sphere; however, this expresses the creator of being, instead of being itself. Hence Ananke belongs here as the goddess of wisdom, as Aeschylus called her, for the same reason the inner logic of the entire train of thought ends with her. Finally the question is posed about the divine, the sphere itself, and thus the chain comes to an end, forming a perfect ring. It seems to be good archaic terminology, perhaps not without relation to other, mythical aspects of the idea, that Necessity stands for the Strongest, since domination is ascribed to her as to an old goddess of the universe. In the image of the sphere, where the true existence of thought can alone recognize itself, the non-corporeal Ananke becomes conceivable, being the law that forms the world and holds it together. The entire cosmos, as it were, becomes her image and attribute, and Thales in pointing to her poses a question and simultaneously gives the answer.

Otto Brendel, on statements of Thales and other ancient greeks on Ananke (Necessity), in Symbolism of the Sphere : A Contribution to the History of Earlier Greek Philosophy (1977), p. 37.

Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland, as quoted in Reason, Thought, and Language; Or, The Many and the One : A Revised System of Logical Doctrine in Relation to the Forms of Idiomatic Discourse (1906) by Douglas Macleane.

He detested those in the Order who dressed in three layers of clothing or who wore soft clothes without necessity. As for “necessity” not based on reason but on pleasure, he declared that it was a sign of a spirit that was extinguished. “When the spirit is lukewarm,” he said, “and gradually growing cold as it moves from grace, flesh and blood inevitably seek their own interests. When the soul finds no delight, what is left except for the flesh to look for some? Then the base instinct covers itself with the excuse of necessity, and the mind of the flesh forms the conscience.

In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity.Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others'. This feeling mercifully mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralyzing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humor, above all, has its due place.

Albert Einstein in "Mein Weltbild" (1931) ["My World-view", or "My View of the World" or "The World As I See It"], translated as the title essay of the book The World As I See It (1949).

Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. and people die.

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy."

Experience, the interpreter between formative nature and the human race, teaches how that nature acts among mortals; and being constrained by necessity cannot act otherwise than as reason, which is its helm, requires her to act.

Necessity is the law of the time and action, and things are lawful by necessity, which otherwise are not; "Quicguid necessitas cogit, defendit"; and the law of the time must regulate the law of the place in such public things.

Unity in things Necessary, Liberty in things Unnecessary, and Charity in all.

Rupertus Meldenius(Peter Meiderlin) in Paraenesis votiva pro Pace Ecclesiae ad Theologos Augustanae Confessionis, Auctore Ruperto Meldenio Theologo (c. 1627). Some forms of this statement have been attributed to Richard Baxter, but though he used the motto, he himself attributed it to Meldenius.

So spake the Fiend, and with necessity,
The tyrant's plea, excused his devilish deed.

From blind physical necessity, which is always and everywhere the same, no variety adhering to time and place could evolve, and all variety of created objects which represent order and life in the universe could happen only by the willful reasoning of its original Creator, Whom I call the Lord God. ~ Isaac Newton

Sometimes a great example is necessary to all the public functionaries of the state.

From blind physical necessity, which is always and everywhere the same, no variety adhering to time and place could evolve, and all variety of created objects which represent order and life in the universe could happen only by the willful reasoning of its original Creator, Whom I call the Lord God.

I have often been told of people who have been able to continue one and the same dream over three and more successive nights: facts which clearly show that our innermost being, our common foundation, experiences dreams with profound pleasure and joyful necessity.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1888), aphorism 552, as translated by Anthony M. Ludovici.

A person may be as radical as you please, and still may make an extremely conservative estimate of the force of necessity exhibited by a given set of conditions. A radical, for example, may think we should get on a great deal better if we had an entirely different system of government, and yet, at this time and under conditions now existing, he may take a strongly conservative view of the necessity for pitching out our system, neck and crop, and replacing it with another. He may think our fiscal system is iniquitous in theory and monstrous in practice, and be ever so sure he could propose a better one, but if on consideration of all the circumstances he finds that it is not necessary to change that system, he is capable of maintaining stoutly that it is necessary not to change it.

It is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

My steps have pressed the flowers,
That to the Muses' bowers
The eternal dews of Helicon have given:
And trod the mountain height,
Where Science, young and bright,
Scans with poetic gaze the midnight-heaven.
Yet have I found no power to vie
With thine, severe necessity!

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of humanfreedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

William Pitt the Elder, in a speech on the India Bill (18 November 1783), reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 550-51; also in Famous Sayings and Their Authors (1906) by Edward Latham, p. 44.

What the Russian autocrats and their supporters fear most is that the success of libertarian Socialismin Spain might prove to their blind followers that the much vaunted "necessity of dictatorship" is nothing but one vast fraud which in Russia has led to the despotism of Stalin and is to serve today in Spain to help the counter-revolution to a victory over the revolution of the workers and the peasants.

In the first place, it is not improper to observe, that the law of cases of necessity is not likely to be well furnished with precise rules; necessity creates the law, it supersedes rules; and whatever is reasonable and just in such cases, is likewise legal; it is not to be considered as matter of surprise, therefore, if much instituted rule is not to be found on such subjects.

I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,Like watery words awash; like meanings said
By repetitions of half-meanings.

For those who believe, no explanation is necessary; for those who do not believe, no explanation is possible. ~ Franz Werfel

Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma. ~ E. B. White

He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance separated from him by an abyss. The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion of several distinct species that cannot communicate. Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.

Simone Weil, "The Iliad or The Poem of Force" (1940-1941) in Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986) edited by Siân Miles, p. 192.

For those who believe, no explanation is necessary; for those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.